MY FATHER, MY FICTION

By Joyce Carol Oates; Joyce Carol Oates is the author, most recently, of the novel ''American Appetites.'' This article is adapted from the anthology ''Family Portraits,'' to be published by Doubleday next fall.

Published: March 19, 1989

A NOVEMBER DAY, 1988, and I am sitting in my study in our house in Princeton, N.J., as dusk comes on, listening to my father playing the piano in another wing of the house. Flawlessly, he's moving through the presto agitato of Schubert's ''Erl King,'' striking the nightmarish sequence of notes firmly but rapidly. There's a shimmering quality to the sound, and I'm thinking how the mystery of music is a paradigm of the mystery of personality: most of us ''know'' family members exclusive of statistical information, sometimes in defiance of it, in the way that we ''know'' familiar pieces of music without having the slightest comprehension of their thematic or structural composition. We recognize them after a few notes, that's all. The powerful appeal of music is inexplicable, forever mysterious, like the subterranean urgings of the soul, and so too the powerful appeal of certain personalities in our lives. We are rarely aware of the gravitational forces we embody for others, but we are keenly aware of the gravitational forces certain others embody for us. To say my father, my mother is for me to name but in no way to approach one of the central mysteries of my life.

How did the malnourished circumstances of my parents' early lives allow them to grow, to blossom, into the exemplary people they have become? - is there no true relationship between personal history and personality? - is character, bred in the bone, absolute fate? And what are facts, that we should imagine they have the power to explain the world to us? On the contrary, it is facts that must be explained. HERE ARE FACTS:

My father's father, Joseph Carlton Oates, left his wife and son when my father, an only child, was 2 or 3 years old. Abandoned them, to be specific: they were very poor. Twenty-eight years later, Joseph Carlton reappeared to seek out his son, Frederic . . . arrived at a country tavern in Millersport, N.Y., one night about 1944, not to ask forgiveness of his son for his selfishness as a father, not even to be reconciled with him, or to explain himself. He had come, he announced, to beat up his son.

It seems that Joseph Carlton had heard rumors that Frederic had long held a grudge against him, wanted to fight him. Thus Joseph Carlton sought him out to bring the fight to him, so to speak. He'd been living not far away (which might mean, in those days, as close as 20 miles), totally out of contact with his ex-wife, my grandmother. But when the drunk, belligerent Joseph Carlton confronted Frederic, the one in his early 50's, the other a young married man of 30, it turned out that the younger man had in fact no special grudge against the older and did not care to fight him, though challenged.

''I couldn't bring myself to hit someone that old,'' my father says.

Joseph Carlton Oates and Frederic Oates are said to have resembled each other dramatically. But though I resemble both my father and my long-deceased grandfather, I never saw this grandfather's face, not even in a photograph. Joseph Carlton - of whom my grandmother would say, simply, whenever she was asked of him, ''he was no good'' - became one of those phantom beings, no doubt common in family histories, who did not exist.

SUPPOSE JOSEPH CARLTON OATES HAD NOT abandoned his wife and young son in 1916. Suppose he'd continued to live with them. It is likely that, given his penchant for drinking and for aggressive behavior, he might very well have been abusive to his wife and to my father, would surely have ''beaten him up'' many times - so infecting him, if we are to believe current theories of the etiology of domestic violence, with a similar predisposition toward violence. So abandoning his young family was perhaps the most generous gesture Joseph Carlton Oates could have made, though that was not the man's intention. My father was born in 1914 in

Lockport, N.Y., a small city approximately 20 miles north of Buffalo and 15 miles south of Lake Ontario, in Niagara County; its distinctive feature is the steep rock-sided Erie Canal that runs literally through its core. Because they were poor, my grandmother (the former Blanche Morgenstern) frequently moved with her son from one low-priced rental to another.

But after he grew up and married my mother (the former Carolina Bush), my father came to live in my (Continued on Page 80) mother's adoptive parents' farmhouse in Millersport; and has remained on that land ever since.

My mother has lived on this attractive rural property at the northern edge of Erie County, by the Tonawanda Creek, in the old farmhouse (built 1888) and then in the newer, smaller house in which my parents now live (wood frame, white aluminum siding and brown trim, built in 1961 largely by way of my father's efforts), virtually all her life. This is over 70 years: Carolina Bush was born Nov. 8, 1916, the youngest of a large farm family, given to her aunt as an infant when her father suddenly died and left the family impoverished. (Is ''die'' too circumspect a term? In fact, my maternal grandfather was killed in a tavern brawl.) In time, Frederic and Carolina had three children: I was born in 1938 (on Bloomsday: June 16), my brother Fred (''Robin'' for most of our childhood, thus to me Robin forever) was born in 1943, my sister Lynn (who has been institutionalized as autistic since early adolescence) in 1956.